HN remains good primarily because of the moderators. Thanks Dang!

Real question for those convinced HN is awash in HN bots: What actual value do you believe there is, other than curiosity, that is driving people to build the HN spam bots you think you're seeing?

Karma doesn't help your posts rank higher.

There is no concept of "friends" or "network."

Karma doesn't bring any other value to your account.

My personal read is it's just a small steady influx of clueless folks coming over from Reddit and thinking what works there will work here, but I'm interested in your thoughts.

I'd like to think we have enough of a proactive community to mitigate this issue for the most part - just set your profile back to Show Dead / etc. if you want to see the amount of chaff that gets discarded.

Also, wasn't the initial goal of lobste.rs to be a sort of even more "mensa card carrying members only" exclusive version of Hacker News?

In the seven years I've been on HN, it has gone through different phases, each with a noticeable change in the quality of the comments.

One big shift came at the beginning of COVID, when everyone went work-from home. Another came when Elon Musk bought X. There have been one or two other events I've noticed, but those are the ones I can recall now. For a short while, many of the comments were from low-grade Russian and Chinese trolls, but almost all of those are long gone. I don't know if it was a technical change at HN, or a strategy change externally.

I don't know if it's internal or external or just fed by internet trends, but while it is resistant, HN is certainly not immune from the ills affecting the rest of the internet.